India too has been adding more green cover than ever. Higher CO2 in atmosphere leads to faster growth of forests. But more important factor is urbanization for India. As people move to cities the need to cut down trees goes down.
India too has been adding more green cover than ever. Higher CO2 in atmosphere leads to faster growth of forests. But more important factor is urbanization for India. As people move to cities the need to cut down trees goes down.
India doesn't do it in an organized way though.
You'll read about some 70 year old woman/man in an obscure village who's reforested thousands of acres on their own, or resuscitated a lake (e.g. the lake guy in Bengaluru).
But there's little effort to harness their knowledge in a systematic way, add knowledge from others into the knowledge bank, do peer review, and then systematically dispense the knowledge in the form of a kit to environmentalists and bureaucrats across the country. China did this, and that's why they're so successful.
Do you personally know that or just from feelings?
Because I know of several organisations doing this and are organising projects state-wide (they focused in Bihar and surroundings).
I would love for you to point me in the direction of the knowledge-bases (peer-reviewed ones) that these organizations have produced. If you can also point me in the direction of the kits they've produced, that would be extra sweet.
If you don't, readers of this comment are going to assume there aren't any, and you're just doing an ego-defense of Indian "capability".
Meh! Practical result matters not papers. Everything done in paper. What I've seen in India is trees are planted with publicity, photos, but are not take care of and dies, another program starts and plants thousands of trees, dies within a year, circle goes round. Otherhand seeing many hills destroyed for construction needs.
The number of planted tree grows but benefit not seen, except for the group doing it. People are too into feelings, by seeing the headlines they need to feel good that's why so much publicity is needed, so many banners everywhere, ads in news-paper spending billions by gov.
Yeah another example of the saying "India is a disappointment to both optimists and pessimists".
One nice thing about these developing countries is due to the power infrastructure tends to be not very good - which prompts people to take things into their hands and install solar, not to save the planet but to stave off brownouts, and be able to run the AC around the clock to stave off the heat.
For residential, solar + batteries straight up beats legacy infra on cost, and with the upcoming cheap sodium batteries, things are only going to get better.
Like how mobile payments took off in Africa early because they weren't held back by existing infrastructure.
In fact mobile infrastructure in general kind of leapfrogged land lines in many developing nations. Why run tens of thousands of kilometres of land lines when you could just dot self-sufficient wireless comms towers around the place?
Tokyo is so built up that cellphones were cheaper in the 90’s than land lines.
While the trend looks positive on paper, it's worth digging into the quality and type of vegetation being added
Doesn't that put pressure on the cities itself especially the peripheral counties to pave way for housing and concrete roads?
Cities tend to expand up. Almost all buildings in Mumbai that are under 5 stories are targeted for "redevelopment" i.e. a developer buying it out and building something taller in its place.
That is too costly for cities that have cheap and abandoned agricultural land waiting to be deforested and build upon.
What does “deforested” mean? Isn’t agricultural land already deforested?
The time / distance of commute is a natural limiting factor.
Yes, and it's a good thing.
Either way, you need to fit the needs of the same number of people. If they're in a dense city near everything they need, they use less space.
Policies to limit urban sprawl just an expensive way to create more sprawl elsewhere - and roads to it.
> Yes, and it's a good thing
It is. I have seen the data
But I live in a rural area of New Zealand and I also see how people moving onto farm land greatly increases tree cover (not forrest) and biodiversity, I assume because people plant gardens, and closely husband them
In New Zealand farmers are grossly damaging to the environment. They clear everything and plant mono cultures and treat water as exhaustable and rivers as waste dumps
So yes people in cities is a good thing, but people in rural areas are good, to
Guess it depends on whether subsistence living is more resource intensive than urban living where on average urbanites own more possessions per capita.
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This is opposite to everything I've ever read. A brief "greening" period was expected (and is now nearing its end) as climate change started taking off due specifically to this effect.
Edit: to clarify, I'm saying the greening thing already happened due to increases in CO2 levels (though it's possible this is due to heat and not CO2 itself, I guess?).
Hmmm, separately of plant-types, I wonder if there may be a distinction here between how a surge in individual growth doesn't necessarily translate to a surge in the forest.
Imagine a higher CO2 concentration allows a tree to reach maturity a whole +25% faster, taking 16y instead of 20y. However its happening in an established forest, already bounded by mountains, rivers, etc, where mature trees sustain for another 100y before they finally die off and take 10y to decompose, opening the spot for a replacement.
In that case, the number of simultaneous trees doesn't go up very much, because the main effect is to reduce "downtime". The "duty-cycle" for a tree-sized patch of ground goes from having a mature tree ~77% of the time to ~79%.
Interesting theory. I imagine there would be a stratification of mature and immature trees that would be pretty striking if this is the case. It might not be hard to find out if it's true!
So, it turns out that there are two types of plants: those whose growth is rate-limited by available CO2, and those whose aren't, as the latter evolved a more efficient pathway during a previous era of low CO2 concentrations.
So depending on which kinds of plants, you can both be right.
beat me to that.
We will get a change in the mix of plant life.
The scientific research says that drought resistance is due to the increased vegetation growth.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09819...
www.igb.illinois.edu/article/stronger-drought-resistance-urban-vegetation-due-higher-temperature-co2-and-reduced-o3
So why are the forests growing faster
Climate patterns are changing. My kids will retire with the cheap old farmland we bought that I’m planting black walnuts on.
Upstate NY was ideal maple syrup production territory for years. Now, we’ve changed from USDA Zone 5 to 6, so the region will be more like western Virginia in 20 years.
The TLDR is that they aren't. Global warming made some areas more hospitable to forests (warmer, more precipitation) and increased drought resistance counteracts some of the increased aridity in other ares: https://e360.yale.edu/features/greening-drylands-carbon-diox...
The atmosphere has so far barely changed in temperature compared to natural variations in temperature over time that had smaller and lesser effects than the effect we are seeing.
The abnormally rapid rise in CO2 levels we are seeing is unusual and accords better with the unusualness of rapid global greening. It isn't climate change that is causing it. It is CO2, directly.
If you look at the absorption spectrum of CO2 and historical data, I think it would be more correct to say, that CO2 has caused a noticeable increase in temperature in the past, but now absorption has reached a saturation level. The last 100 years temperature effects might have been dominant, but in the future direct effects of CO2 are absolutely going to dominate.